Charles Louis-Camille Saroléa (24 October 1870 in

Tongeren Tongeren (; ; ; ) is a city and former municipality located in the Belgian province of Limburg, in the southeastern corner of the Flemish region of Belgium. Tongeren is the oldest town in Belgium, as the only Roman administrative capital wit ...

– 11 March 1953 in

Edinburgh Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. The city is located in southeast Scotland and is bounded to the north by the Firth of Forth and to the south by the Pentland Hills. Edinburgh ...

) was a Belgian

philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of ...

and author.

Life

Saroléa was born in

on 24 October 1870 the son of Dr Jean Pierre Saroléa MD. He was educated at Lycee Athenee at

Hasselt Hasselt (, , ) is the capital and largest City status in Belgium, city of the Provinces of Belgium, province of Limburg (Belgium), Limburg in the Flemish Region of Belgium. As of 1 August 2023, Hasselt had a total population of 80,846. The old ...

. He then studied at the

University of Liège The University of Liège (), or ULiège, is a major public university of the French Community of Belgium founded in 1817 and based in Liège, Wallonia, Belgium. Its official language is French (language), French. History The university was foun ...

. He moved to Edinburgh in 1894 as Head of French at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the City of Edinburgh Council, town council under th ...

(as Dr Sarolea). He initially lived in a flat at 74 Bruntsfield Place. In 1903 he was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and Literature, letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". ...

. His proposers were

George Chrystal George Chrystal FRSE FRS (8 March 1851 – 3 November 1911) was a Scottish mathematician. He is primarily known for his books on algebra and his studies of seiches (wave patterns in large inland bodies of water) which earned him a Gold Meda ...

Alexander Crum Brown Alexander Crum Brown Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, FRSE Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS (26 March 1838 – 28 October 1922) was a Scottish Organic chemistry, organic chemist. Alexander Crum Brown Road in Edinburgh's King's Buildi ...

, Sir Francis Grant Ogilvie and

James Gordon MacGregor James Gordon MacGregor, Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS FRSE LLD (31 March 1852 in Halifax (former city), Halifax, Colony of Nova Scotia, British North America – 21 May 1913 in Edinburgh) was a Canadian physicist. He was described as "brillian ...

. He was also a member of the Scottish Arts Club. In 1910, he moved to 21 Royal Terrace on

Calton Hill Calton Hill (; ) is a hill in central Edinburgh, Scotland, situated beyond the east end of Princes Street and included in the city's United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO World Heritage Site. Views of, and f ...

. He was an avid book collector, and his library grew to such proportions that he took an adjoining property on the terrace to accommodate it. Saroléa wrote on Russia and edited a library of French authors for the publisher J.M. Dent. From 1912 to 1917 he edited ''

Everyman The everyman is a stock character of fiction. An ordinary and humble character, the everyman is generally a protagonist whose benign conduct fosters the audience's identification with them. Origin and history The term ''everyman'' was used ...

'', a weekly literary magazine favourable to the doctrine of

distributism Distributism is an economic theory asserting that the world's productive assets should be widely owned rather than concentrated. Developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, distributism was based upon Catholic social teaching princi ...

. In 1915, he was sent by the Belgian government to the United States to support the veracity of atrocity stories in circulation about the German occupation of Belgium. The mission was not a success, in that Saroléa publicly attacked the neutrality that the US was observing at the time with respect to

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

. Recent academic interest has been on his political views. In 1918, he was given his professorship by the University of Edinburgh which he held until retiral in 1931. Saroléa died in Edinburgh on 11 March 1953.

Family

Saroléa married twice: firstly in 1895 to Martha van Cauwenberghe, then secondly in 1905 to Julia Dorman. His niece Marie Antoinette Saroléa married the cartographer John Bartholomew.

Artistic recognition

His portrait by William Leadbetter Calderwood is held by the University of Edinburgh.

Works

* ''Henrik Ibsen'' (1891) * ''Essais de philosophie et de littérature'' (1898) * ''Les belges au Congo'' (1899) * ''A Short History of the Anti-Congo Campaign'' (1905) * ''The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution'' (1906) * ''Newman's Theology'' (1908) * ''The Anglo-German Problem'' (1912) * ''Count L.N. Tolstoy. His life and work'' (1912) * ''How Belgium Saved Europe'' (1915) * ''The Curse of the Hohenzollern'' (1915) * ''The Murder of Nurse Cavell'' (1915) * ''The French Renascence'' (1916) * ''Europe's Debt to Russia'' (1916) * ''Great Russia Her Achievement and Promise'' (1916) * ''German problems and personalities'' (1917) * ''The Russian revolution and the war'' (1917) * ''The Maid of Orleans: The Story of Joan of Arc Told to American Soldiers'' (1918) * ''Europe and the League of Nations'' (1919) * ''Versailles und der Völkerbund'' (1920) * ''Letters on Polish Affairs'' (1922) * ''Impressions of Soviet Russia'' (1924) * ''Robert Louis Stevenson and France'' (1924) * ''The Policy of Sanctions and the Failure of the League of Nations'' (1936) * ''Daylight on Spain: The Answer to the Duchess of Atholl'' (1937)

Notes

References

*Samantha T. Johnson, ''Holy war in Europe: Charles Sarolea, Everyman and the First World War, 1914–17'' in ''War and the Media: Reportage and Propaganda, 1900–2003'' editors

Mark Connelly Mark Connelly was a professor and Head of the School of History, at the University of Kent in Canterbury, where he was both a military historian, and the Reuters Lecturer in Media History. Connelly specialises in the 19th Century and First World ...

, David Welch *Sam Johnson,Playing the Pharisee'? Charles Sarolea, Czechoslovakia and the road to Munich, 1915–1939'', Slavonic and East European review 2004, vol. 82, no.2, pp. 292–314 *G.K. Chesterton writes about Sarolea in his Autobiography (1936), Grey Arrow edition 1959 p. 81f.

External links

*
The Political Imagination of Charles Sarolea by Peter S. Rieth, The Imaginative Conservative website, accessed 13 April 2018

Charles Saroléa at encyclopedia.farlex.com
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Sarolea, Charles 1870 births 1953 deaths University of Liège alumni Academics of the University of Edinburgh Belgian philologists